This excellent article “Haditha: Is McGirk the New Mary Mapes?” in The American Thinker is being linked all around the blogosphere. Many pro-war and right-wing bloggers have been counseling patience since this first came out, and this article certainly illustrates the wisdom of that view. I don’t think bloggers should hold themselves to the old classic journalism standards, because blogging is not reporting, it is editorial in nature. I use the qualifiers old and classic because today’s journalists don’t hold themselves to those standards. In this case, it is looking more and more like the mainstream media and many bloggers on the left are going to get a well-deserved smackdown. They may not, of course – when the investigation is done, we may learn that Murtha was factual in his statements. I seriously doubt it, but I’m not going to close my mind to the possibility.
Remember the Jill Carroll flap on the right side of the blogosphere? Because she was on the left, and because we didn’t think the statements she made after she was freed from her kidnappers were sufficiently harsh to her kidnappers or thankful to the troops, many people including me made statements that we later retracted. A couple of people didn’t retract or apologize, resulting in a second wave of posts, a few de-linkings and more arguing and sniping. But most bloggers did eat crow.
Lileks framed it perfectly in “Self-Loathing and the Denial of Terrorism.”
You find yourself almost wishing there was another real attack, so people could see the logical consequences of “fighting back” after 9/11. Yes, it would be bad, but sometimes you have to break an egg to show people the health impact of omelettes.
While I don’t remember anybody at DU phrasing it in quite this way, the sentiment of many there seems consistent with that statement. Whatever it takes to prove that Bush was an evil, lying liar and wrong, Wrong, WRONG! is okay in their book.
If Haditha turns out to be a hoax or exaggerated, we will not only not see any apologies or crow-eating, but instead we’ll see accusations that the military is engaging in a cover-up. Where we do see a rare retraction, it will as always be on A-20 below the fold, not A-1 above it. I hope I’m wrong. But just like Zarqawi’s death is being played off as irrelevant, with hints of misconduct (“he was alive? did he get medical care? the troops beat him?!”) many people have invested so deeply in our losing this war that they can’t afford to admit being wrong even about an incident, much less the whole war. I’ve gone from questioning their patriotism, to questioning their humanity, to questioning their sanity.
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